"How we ask why" can make the difference between getting a good answer, a bad answer, or no answer at all.
How we ask why sets the conditions for the kind of answer that is even possible.
The biggest factors in the "how of why" are genus, scope, and framing: What kind of question is this? How big is this question? What context am I assuming in asking this question?
These are not entirely independent factors.
Scope can vary from the specifics of one special case--"Why did this particular accident happen?"--to as large as you like: "Why do planes crash?"
Starting at a small scope is not necessarily limiting, as it can put us on the path to the largest scope imaginable. Smaller scope also allows the detailed study of multiple instances, which can affect how we think about genus and context.
Newton started asking "Why do things move?" by considering the fall of one particular apple and ended up with universal gravitation.
He was sitting in an orchard near his family home while hiding out from the plague, and noticed an apple fall from a nearby tree.
If you've not seen this happen, I recommend it, because it's actually quite unusual. We rarely see a suspended object just drop. There's something almost magical about it: the apple, and very often the whole scene, are perfectly still in the warm autumnal air... and then the apple is in motion. A moment later the sound of it hitting the ground comes to your ears, and all is still again.
One of the unusual features of this motion is there is no prior motion. You don't see any platform or support being pulled away. There is nothing visible that incites or impels the motion. The cause is invisible: the chemical bonds holding the stem to the branch weaken due to some biological process attendant upon ripening, and eventually the connection reaches a point where it is no longer capable of sustaining the apple's weight, and it falls.
Earlier theories of motion were focused on something called impetus that was considered "the amount of motion" that had been passed to the moving object. Throwing was a big deal in impetus theory, and that tended to focus the answer to the question of "Why do things move?"
The answer was: "Impetus is passed to the object from the thrower."
It sounds like an answer, doesn't it? But if we ask, "What's impetus?" the only answer the ancients had was, "It's a substance that makes things move." So their answer to why things move was: "The substance that makes things move is passed to the object from the thrower."
Which doesn't sound like much of an explanation, does it?
What it does do is reveal the problem with unmeasurable ontologies: the only function of "impetus" was to be "the substance that that makes things move." It had no other measurable effect. It was assumed to leak out as things travelled, which is why they slowed down. But where did it go? And why couldn't we get it back? If I slide an object over a surface and it slows down, does the impetus go into the surface? Does a lubricant like oil act as a barrier to impetus? If so, why does coating a sliding object with oil slow down the leakage of impetus out of it, but coating a thrown object does not?
Playing the game of "Is this is true what else is true?" is basic to the creation of knowledge, and we are unfortunately not very good at it. If we take the idea of impetus seriously, it has implications that are testable. This was done rarely, at best.
Newton's apple had no obvious source of impetus. Although Aristotle and others had distinguished "violent motion" (like that of a thrown stone) from "natural motion" (like that of a falling body) impetus theory got most of its support from the former, where there was a clear source of the motion that was "put into" the object.
By keeping the scope small Newton shifted the context of the question, which changed the genus. Formerly, the question had been "Why do things slow down?" as much as "Why do things move?" Impetus seemed to solve both those problems. Instead Newton asked, "Why did the apple fall down and not--say--shoot off to the horizon?" That implied a closely linked question: "Why doesn't the apple move before it does?" Starting with a still object led Newton to the idea of inertia--resistance to change in motion--which applied to both still objects and moving objects. No previous theory had taken that view: impetus was an attribute of moving objects only. Still objects were ones from which all the impetus had fled.
Focusing on smaller scope can result in a broader concept. It's possible to get too small--sometimes we do need to see the forest, not the trees--but it never hurts to narrow our focus when we're confused, and see what pops out at us.
Genus is different from scope: it doesn't consider scale but kind. When we ask the "why" of something, we need to be careful that we are asking about the right kind of thing. Or at least not the wrong kind of thing.
We see genus problems a lot in debugging complex systems. Many years ago I encountered a couple of software developers who had worked for several days trying to figure out why their report-viewer application wouldn't display multi-page reports. I was talking to them about something else and noticed they had an image on the second page of their test report. One of the basic disciplines of knowledge creation is to only change one thing at a time, so I suggested they take the image out and see what happened.
The report displayed just fine.
They didn't have a problem with pagination. They had a problem with handling images. Different genuses.
As that example suggests, genus detection often involves changing everything you can think of, one thing at a time, and seeing how the behaviour of interest changes with it. If you change something and the behaviour stays the same, that thing is probably not related to the behaviour.
Context or framing is the assumptions we make. Genus is the most important of those assumptions, which is why I broke it out separately, but there are many others.
Our thinking is dominated by the focus of our attention, and our assumptions dominate our attention. Analyzing our assumptions is the most difficult and important skill if we want to do a better job of asking "Why?" about anything.
A classic example of this the problem of evil: God is supposed to good and all-powerful. Sometimes people break out "all-knowing" as if it was a separate thing, which is itself involves an assumption about what "all-powerful" means. Isn't "knowing" a power? If so, it is already subsumed in "all-powerful". If not, why not?
The problem of evil is that an all-powerful God who is good would not let horrible things happen to people. (All quotes below are taken from this very clear article on the subject.) Answers to this question are the subject of “theodicy”, which is a narrow but lively branch of Christian theology.
There are a number of answers to this argument, which usually concludes God does not exist, and they all depend on the assumption that "all-powerful" doesn't mean "all-powerful".
Consider this very nice statement of "greater good theodicy":
A “greater good theodicy” (GGT) argues that the pain and suffering in God’s world play a necessary role in bringing about greater goods that could not be brought about otherwise.
Meditate on that awhile, and ask yourself: what does "all-powerful" mean? Because there is a huge assumption in this argument, which is that "all-powerful" does not actually mean "all-powerful". To a genuinely all-powerful being the words "could not" do not apply. A being that "could not" bring about a "greater good" without pain or suffering on the part of humanity is not "all-powerful", but an ordinary sort of creature who is bound by the laws of logic as much as you or I.
The fact that being able to bring about an effect without the cause is incomprehensible to us is not an argument: God, being all-powerful and therefore beyond the laws of logic is by nature not comprehensible to us. It's no objection to say, "If God could bring about the greater good without pain and suffering it would necessarily involve something incomprehensible to us."
So we can answer this question quite easily:
But how could a critic reasonably claim to know that there is no reason that would justify God in permitting suffering?
The answer is that an all-powerful God is beyond reason, by definition, and can bring about any end from any cause. That's the only reasonable way to construe of "all-powerful". To say otherwise is to say that God subordinate to, beneath, limited and bound by the laws of logic, which are imposed on God by... something. Such a God is not "all-powerful".
When asking questions about the deepest aspects of existence, about the nature of being, we are faced with the same inexorable problem of assumptions that we face when asking questions about the nature of God. It is far too easy to make assumptions that we cannot imagine being wrong, but which are.
"How we ask why" conditions the kind of answers we are able to reach. If we ask why under false premises, we will arrive at inadequate answers. The fiercest, most fearless interrogation of those assumptions is what is required to have any hope of reaching any kind of understanding... although that understanding sometimes comes in the form of an understanding of the limits of our understanding, as we'll see next week.
Your description of impetus was interesting. The understanding that this historical perspective gives is why I read earlier modern political thinking. I'm waiting for more of this discussion of causation. This is a very difficult subject. There has been little progress made in its discussion maybe since Newton. I look forward to seeing what you say.